On Dead Salmon, Drugs, and “Lighting Up” the Brain
Are fMRIs truly useful in addiction medicine?
What would it take to make neuroimaging a truly valuable tool for addiction medicine? Pictures of brain regions “lighting up” have always been exciting, as the early phase of neuroimaging predictably inspired rapture. Phase 2 arrived when a group of U.S. postdocs created the infamous dead salmon fMRI scan, showing that an exciting and colorful picture of false positives was entirely possible. As Neuroskeptic put it to the Globe and Mail, “Scientific journals prefer to publish results that are positive and ‘sexy,’ just like other media.”
That is nice to hear, si...
Source: Addiction Inbox - April 18, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Marijuana and the Gateway Hypothesis
Smoke pot, shoot smack?
The Great Gateway Hypothesis has had a long, controversial run as a central tenet of American anti-drug campaigns. As put forth by Denise B. Kandell of Columbia University and others in 1975, and refined and redefined ever since, the gateway theory essentially posits that soft drugs like alcohol, cigarettes, and marijuana—particularly marijuana—make users more likely to graduate to hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. What is implied is that gateway drugs cause users to move to harder drugs, by some unknown mechanism. The gateway theory forms part of the backbone of the War on Drugs. By stayin...
Source: Addiction Inbox - April 14, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Thursday is National Alcohol Screening Day
Assess your drinking risk with this easy test.
The more you drink, the less likely you are to accurately perceive the risks of heavy drinking, according to a survey by Screening for Mental Health (SMH), a Boston-area non-profit group. The phone survey of 1,000 adults in the U.S. indicated that 7 out of 10 respondents would consult a health care provider if they “thought they might have a problem with alcohol,” but that only 50% of responders with the highest number of at-risk drinking episodes per year said they would seek medical help.
Phone surveys can be notoriously unreliable when it comes to questions a...
Source: Addiction Inbox - April 10, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Marijuana and Strokes: Medical Reality or Scare Story?
Heavy tokers may be at higher risk, but alcohol is the hidden confounder.
Young people don’t suffer from strokes, as a rule. And when they do, at least half the time there is no obvious cardiovascular explanation. So it’s not surprising that drugs are often invoked as the culprit.
A New Zealand study earlier this year once again raised the specter of a possible link between stroke and marijuana smoking. As reported by Maia Szalavitz at Time Healthland, the confounding issue, as is typical of such studies, is the coexisting use of other drugs, like alcohol and cigarettes. As Szalavitz writes:
The stroke study, whi...
Source: Addiction Inbox - April 7, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Smokers’ Genes: Evidence From a 4-Decade Study
How adolescent risk becomes adult addiction.
Pediatricians have often remarked upon it: Give one adolescent his first cigarette, and he will cough and choke and swear never to try another one. Give a cigarette to a different young person, and she is off to the races, becoming a heavily dependent smoker, often for the rest of her life. We have strong evidence that this difference in reaction to nicotine is, at least in part, a genetic phenomenon.
But so what? Is there any practical use to which such knowledge can be put? As it turns out, the answer may be yes. People with the appropriate gene variations on chromo...
Source: Addiction Inbox - March 28, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
More Hard Facts About Addiction Treatment
“Yes, we take your insurance.”
Recent reportage, such as Anne Fletcher’s book, Inside Rehab, has documented the mediocre application of vague and questionable procedures in many of the nation’s addiction rehab centers. You would not think the addiction treatment industry had much polish left to lose, but now comes a devastating analysis of a treatment industry at “an ethics crossroads,” according to Alison Knopf’s 3-part series in Addiction Professional. Knopf deconstructs the problems inherent in America’s uniquely problematic for-profit treatment industry, and documents a variety of abuses. We are not ta...
Source: Addiction Inbox - March 24, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Drug News in Brief
Short takes on matters various.
Taking Aim at Pot—Researchers have recently made clinical efforts to test three drugs that might help during marijuana withdrawal to keep pot abstainers on the straight and narrow. Researchers at Columbia University, led by Margaret Haney, have been testing a synthetic THC compound called nabilone. The drug is designed to address sleep and appetite problems during withdrawal. Whether it is any better tolerated by users than Marinol, Uncle Sam’s widely unpopular version of synthetic THC, remains to be seen. This approach can be viewed rather like methadone or buprenorphine substitu...
Source: Addiction Inbox - March 20, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Big Tobacco Easily Evades “Light” Cigarette Ban
Color coding allows smokers to easily identify their former brands.
The tobacco industry has once again made a mockery of the Food and Drug Administration’s attempts to ban ‘light” cigarettes from the marketplace, by simply eliminated the objectionable wording and substituting an easily-decoded color scheme. In a brochure prepared for cigarette retailers marked “For trade use only: not to be shown or distributed to customers,” tobacco giant Philip Morris wrote that “some cigarettes and smokeless packaging is changing, but the product remains the same.”
Research done at Harvard demonstrates "the continued at...
Source: Addiction Inbox - March 16, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Dying For Caffeine
It’s not the coffee, it’s everything else.
Late last year, coffee drinkers were buoyed by the release of a massive study in the New England Journal of Medicine that “did not support a positive association between coffee drinking and mortality.” In fact, the analysis by Neal D. Freedman and associates showed that even at the level of 6 or more cups per day, coffee consumption appeared to be mildly protective against diabetes, stroke, and death due to inflammatory diseases. Men who drank that much coffee had a 10% lower risk of death, and women in this category show a 15% lower death risk. Coffee, it seemed, was goo...
Source: Addiction Inbox - March 13, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Bees Benefit From Caffeine
Caffeinated plants provide an unforgettable experience.
Honeybees rewarded with caffeine remember the smell of specific flowers longer than bees given only sucrose, according to a study published in Science. “By using a drug to enhance memories of reward,” the study says, “plants secure pollinator fidelity and improve reproductive success.”
Many drugs used by humans come from plants. But what role do the drugs play for the plants themselves? Frequently, they play the role of toxic avenger, providing a chemical defense against attacks by herbivores. But in smaller doses, they often have pharmacological effects on ...
Source: Addiction Inbox - March 7, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Addiction Machines: How Slots are Designed for Compulsive Play
Your player card, please.
The image of the compulsive gambler has traditionally been the male poker player, drink in hand, recklessly betting the night away. Slot machines? Those were for amateurs, the out-of-towners, the meek and the mild. But that irritating clang and buzz coming from over the card player’s shoulder is not just the sound of new money—it’s the sound of a new technology tuned to a ruthless edge.
Digital slots and poker machines have become the new games of choice for pathological gamblers. In 1999, Harvard addiction researcher Howard Shaffer predicted that, “as smoking crack cocaine changed the c...
Source: Addiction Inbox - March 4, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Craving Relief
Why is it so hard for addicts to say “enough?”
One of the useful things that may yet come out of the much-derided DSM-5 manual of mental disorders is the addition of craving as a criterion for addiction. “Cravings,” writes Dr. Omar Manejwala, a psychiatrist and the former medical director of Hazelden, “are at the heart of all addictive and compulsive behaviors.” Unlike the previous two volumes in this monthful of addiction books, Manejwala’s book, Craving: Why We Can’t Seem To Get Enough, focuses on a specific aspect common to all addiction syndromes, and looks at what people might do to lessen its g...
Source: Addiction Inbox - February 28, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Addiction Rehab: Everything is Broken
Down the rabbit hole in search of effective treatment.
When I first began researching drugs and addiction years ago, a Seattle doctor told me something memorable. “It’s as if you had cancer,” she said, “and your doctor’s sole method of treatment consisted of putting you in a weekly self-help group.”
I’ve got nothing against weekly self-help groups, to be sure. But as Ivan Oransky, executive editor of Reuters Health and a blogger at Retraction Watch, told me as recently as least year, addiction treatment appeared to be “all selling and self-diagnosis. They’re selling you on the fact that you need to be t...
Source: Addiction Inbox - February 26, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
How to Kick Everything
Christopher Kennedy Lawford on recovery.
Christopher Kennedy Lawford’s ambitious, one-size-fits-all undertaking is titled Recover to Live: Kick Any Habit, Manage Any Addiction: Your Self-Treatment Guide to Alcohol, Drugs, Eating Disorders, Gambling, Hoarding, Smoking, Sex, and Porn. That pretty much covers the waterfront, and represents both the strengths and the weaknesses of the book.
There’s no doubting Lawford’s sincerity, or his experiential understanding of addiction, or the fact that the raw ingredients were present in his case: bad genes and a traumatic early environment. He is related to Ted Kennedy, two o...
Source: Addiction Inbox - February 24, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
Khat: A Psychologist's Field Trip
Looking for a chew in London.
I ran across a great story by Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks, about his stroll around London, looking for khat, the East African stimulant plant that is chewed much like coca leaves.
Research psychologist Vaughan Bell is not your average armchair academician. Currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, Bell is well known online for his contributions to the Mind Hacks blog, which covers unusual and intriguing findings in neuroscience and psychology. He recently taught clinical psychiatry at Hospital Universitario San Vicente de Paúl and...
Source: Addiction Inbox - February 20, 2013 Category: Addiction Authors: Dirk Hanson Source Type: blogs
